Talking Private Lives

Below are a series of selected quotes from those who have acted in or directed Private Lives throughout the years giving their perspective on the experience of performing in the play.

“I totally that you can think one thing and then something opposite. She’s making things up, over-dramatising them and walks away from it as though it doesn’t matter.”

— Anna Chancellor on playing Amanda (Gielgud Theatre, 2013)

“These two characters are anarchic and outside of society. What is tragic about Amanda and Elyot is that being together isn’t right either.”

— Toby Stephens on Elyot and Amanda (Gielgud Theatre, 2013)

“It was shocking then and it is shocking now. Coward wrote characters who were equally likeable and dislikeable. In good writing, people say the unsayable.”

— Anna Chancellor and Toby Stephens discuss their roles with Andrew Marr

“You take the characterisation and the audience as far as you can to the edge of the cliff, but you don’t jump off. I have never played comedy like this before and I think it is absolutely fascinating.”

— Anthony Calf on playing Victor and the art of Comic Acting (Gielgud Theatre, 2013)

“I gained a real respect to how personal and open the play was about relationships. It’s astonishing how the audience responds to it and become delighted all over again.”

— Jonathan Kent on directing Private Lives (Gielgud Theatre, 2013)

“I’ve always tried to chart something in my life that resounds with the character’s trajectory and I’ve found a lot in my past that did match what Amanda had gone through. I don’t have a judgment about the way she behaves; I think she is an incredible free spirit. I wish were as brave and impetuous in real life as they are”

— Kim Cattrall on playing Amanda (Music Box Theatre, Broadway 2011)

“One of the things extraordinarily modern about the play is that, like so many today, Elyot has simultaneous desire for stimulation and inner peace. He is selfish, but not in a way that and audience can’t recognise in themselves.”

— Rupert Wickham on playing Elyot (Nottingham Playhouse, 2011)

“She speaks her feelings, so every thought she has comes out. It is exciting to play somebody who thinks so quickly and expresses herself with such an exciting vocabulary. The play says a million things about humanity.”

— Janie Dee on playing Amanda (Nottingham Playhouse, 2011)

“A play like Private Lives must have been very shocking when it first appeared; people weren’t so used to marriage being bandied about like this. The play did not come out in the Roaring ‘20s, but in 1930, with bad times just around the corner and a real hunger for some sort of desperate gaiety. In fact, perhaps that’s something of the appeal it has now.”

— Maggie Smith on Private Lives in the 1930s (46th Street Theatre, Broadway 1974)

“You’d be amazed, you can go on and on finding new things. And suddenly everything becomes clear and you say, ‘Oh yes! That’s the way to do it!’ Onstage, you get so many chances to get it right.”

— Maggie Smith on playing Amanda (46th Street Theatre, Broadway 1974)

“It breaks every known rule of how a play should behave. Elyot and Amanda can’t live with each other and they can’t live without each other, which is the case before the play begins. The focus is certainly on behaviour rather than plot. It makes you consider the nature of love, in all its various forms. It’s certainly never boring.”

— Maria Aitken on Private Lives and playing Amanda (Duchess Theatre, 1980)

“I think there is some fun in it for me, especially when I start inventing my own lines. You remember the bit in the third act when I scream at Elizabeth, ‘Slattern!’ Well, I’ve enlarged that. That gives me a great deal of amusement, although Noël must be spinning in his grave…Yes, I’m playing to the lines, going for the laughs, the double entendres.”

— Richard Burton in an interview with New York Magazine on playing Elyot (Lunt-Fontainne Theatre, 1983)

“As soon as I picked up the play and began to read it, I fell instantly in love with it really. I found it to be wonderfully witty, fresh, moving, and complex. The dialogue seemed so vibrantly alive, just as resonant now as it ever was. I had been longing to something funny for some time, having felt periodically frustrated by labels like ‘serious’ and ‘classical’, so Amanda felt like a gift. The fact of her being such a bad girl appealed very much too.”

— Juliet Stevenson talking to Russell Jackson on playing Amanda (National Theatre, 1999)

“For heaven’s sake it just adds a giggle to the whole thing. At this point, I know who I am and what I am.”

— Elizabeth Taylor on her and Burton’s relationship in light of playing Amanda and Elyot (Lunt-Fontainne Theatre, 1983)

“I had only seen the play once I think, and Howard [the Director] had never seen it so I think we all approached it as a new play. We also thought there was about a 90 percent chance of us enjoying it.”

— Lindsay Duncan on playing Amanda (Albery Theatre, 2001)

“Rehearsals for the London production of Private Lives began in late August. But the events of September 11 caused collective doubt about the project’s importance. We couldn’t have felt more stupid: ‘Oh, here we are doing Noël Coward’, but I think we realised that people actually have a human need to laugh, even at times like that.”

— Alan Rickman on the context surrounding his production of Private Lives (Albery Theatre, 2001)